Page 122 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

ANGLO-AMERICAN FEMINISM

Millett’s work initiated a whole range of studies into the various
ways in which an androcentric culture had constructed persistently
negative images of women, studies which extended beyond her own
initial focus on masculine high culture, to include both élite and
popular cultural forms, produced by and for both men and women.
This interest in negative gender stereotyping also laid the
groundwork for an account of male pornography as representing
women in acutely misogynist form, which became increasingly
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relevant to practical feminist politics. This critique of cultural sexism
had no direct counterpart in Marxist cultural theory, which typically
accepted early bourgeois culture, at least, as “progressive”. Feminists
generally attribute no parallel progressive rôle to patriarchy, though
some might concede its historical near-inevitability. Hence, the
vigour with which second wave feminism was able to prosecute its
case against the masculine cultural ascendancy.
But this early critique of sexism moved quite quickly toward the
recovery, and celebration, of women’s own culture. The term coined
by Showalter for this latter development was “gynocritics”, a
translation of the French word, la gynocritique, by which she meant
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the discovery of “woman as the producer of textual meaning”. One
important line of argument here had been the attempt to discover a
female tradition, and perhaps even a female Great Tradition.
Showalter’s own A Literature of Their Own and Ellen Moers’s
Literary Women both explored such notions. For Showalter, there
was indeed a distinctively female tradition in English literature, a
tradition which had evolved through three broad phases, those of
imitation, protest, and self-discovery. The central aim for Showalter,
as she made clear in her closing lines, was still to be “great” art: “if
contact with a female tradition and a female culture is a center; if
women take strength in their independence to act in the world, then
Shakespeare’s sister, whose coming Woolf asked us to await in
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patience and humility, may appear at last”. Moers, too, detected a
female tradition, one perhaps less obviously proto-canonical than
Showalter’s, but one characterized nonetheless by a distinctively
“female realism”, in which “money and its making were
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characteristically female…subjects”. Gynocritics has had one
obviously important practical corollary within the women’s
movement: the creation of independent feminist publishing houses
such as Virago, committed to the recovery and republication of

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